News
Blue Origin continues SpaceX-competitive rocket R&D with hot-fire engine tests
Prospective SpaceX-competitor Blue Origin is continuing research and development work in earnest in an effort to push its first orbital-class rocket, known as New Glenn, closer to the massive vehicle’s launch debut.
In early August, the company shared a video showing a small segment of a long-duration hot-fire test of the rocket engine that will power New Glenn’s second stage, the upper segment of the rocket tasked with placing payloads (typically satellites) into their final orbit(s).
Recent footage of BE-3U demonstration engine hot fire. Two BE-3Us will power upper stage of #NewGlenn & deliver our customers to orbit. We’ve completed over 700 seconds of test time & confirmed performance assumptions used for final BE-3U expander cycle design #GradatimFerociter pic.twitter.com/ygJlgHkyE1
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) August 10, 2018
Blue Origin recently announced an intriguing decision to change the upper stage engine its New Glenn rocket will use, moving from a vacuum version of the booster’s massive BE-4 engine (BE-4U) to two updated and modified BE-3 engines, the same propulsion system that powers the company’s much smaller New Shepard suborbital rocket. Rated for roughly 110,000 pounds of thrust (compared to Merlin 1D’s ~190,000 lbf thrust), a duo of the vacuum-optimized engines would be expected to produce roughly the same amount of thrust as SpaceX’s Merlin Vacuum (MVac) upper stage engine.
Before BE-3U took its place, Blue’s original plan was to fly New Glenn as a full-up liquid methane and liquid oxygen (methalox0rocket) on both first and second stages, simplifying the vehicle’s fluid systems and the launch pad’s own ground systems. By replacing BE-4U with BE-3U, the company is instead choosing to make New Glenn’s first stage methalox while the second stage will use liquid hydrogen and oxygen (hydrolox).
- A likely dated mockup of New Glenn at the LC-36 launch pad. (Blue Origin)
- Blue Origin’s aspirational future, the highly reusable BE-4 powered New Glenn rocket. (Blue Origin)
- Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, the propulsion for New Glenn, seen conducting hot-fire tests in Texas. The engine’s nozzles is a full 6 feet (~1.8m) in diameter. (Blue Origin)
- BE-3U seen testing at Blue Origin’s Texas facilities in August 2018. (Blue Origin)
Blue Origin certainly does have more experience flying hydrolox rockets thanks to its suborbital New Shepard program, and BE-3 is also a mature engine as a result. However, the decision is still difficult to parse. Critically, the company chose to significantly change a fundamental aspect of the rocket engine, moving from a combustion tap-off cycle to an expander cycle, where “cycle” refers to the mechanisms used to pump fuel and oxidizer into a rocket engine’s combustion chamber.
Changing cycles is a fairly dramatic revision and consequently diminishes the value of what might be called “flight-heritage” hardware, or rocket components that have been extensively tested and proven during actual flight operations. Noting one of the main points Blue Origin itself has made in the past and on its own website, it should come as no surprise that New Glenn’s launch debut is believed to have slipped from 2020 into 2021 or even 2022, originally reported by Reuters earlier this month.
“With extensive testing and use on New Shepard and the BE-3, the BE-3U will be one of the best-understood rocket engines before it ever launches into space [on New Glenn].” – Blue Origin
New Glenn’s debut delays will likely push Blue Origin’s first lunar Blue Moon landings beyond the original 2023 launch target. Regardless, a considerable amount of work thus lays before Blue Origin before they will be ready to seriously compete with the likes of SpaceX, Arianespace, and ULA on the global launch market.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
News
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.



